The Children of Hypnos

[Vol. 2] Chapter 1: The Eye of Hypnos

Winter came early to the Sleeping City.

The suburbs were an iced wonderland, snowmen standing tall in yards and the remains of snowball fights left behind as children, released on snow days from school, went inside to get warm. Snow blanketed the clean grid of the streets, the office buildings and the coffee shops, the apartments and the museums. It coated the tall spire of Van Der Gelt Tower, looming over downtown, the purple strip lights along its length glowing to life as night descended.

Emery Ashworth watched the lights bloom one by one, the bottom of the tower to the top, from her perch on the roof of Kirkland Hall. She had loved snow, once. When she was little, her mother had danced with her in the snow of Moscow. Her father had taught her to make snow angels. She had eaten snow as it melted out of her hands, and crafted small animal friends out of snow, and tunneled through snowdrifts to make hideouts for herself. Snow made the world quiet and safe.

Now when she looked out, all she saw was her brother's comatose form, crumpled on the floor of a snowbound gazebo, one of her revolvers beside him and his doppelgänger dissolving on the winter wind.

Fenhallow Academy sat beneath a snug coat of white, marked by the tracks of students and teachers. The trail up to Kirkland had turned to slush and dirt; light spilled from the dorm's front, turning the walk blue and yellow as the night deepened. Emery pulled her knees closer to her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs. The tip of her nose had gone numb at least an hour ago. She grabbed a handful of her long, curly black hair and pulled it in front of her face for cover.

The sun disappeared beneath the horizon. In the distance, lights flickered on beneath a billboard that overlooked the highway coming into the Sleeping City. White letters on a black backdrop floated high above the earth:

FIND HOME HERE,

CHILDREN OF HYPNOS

Emery watched pairs of students file toward Fenhallow's front gates. They wore black dreamform armor beneath their winter coats and carried the gold-and-silver dreamform weapons. Swords, hammers, knives, spears, shields, whips, anything that had been used throughout history to kill, now pulled from a dreamhunter subconscious to banish nightmares back to the strange and shifting ether-world of the Dream.

There'd been trepidation from Fenhallow's administration about sending students on dreamhunting missions since the events of Fenhalloween, but most of the Sleeping City's dreamhunting load was given to the students, and the school couldn't completely shut down that part of its curriculum. Fenhallow was the largest producer of dreamhunters in all of North America; when most dreamhunters didn't live to see thirty, a hiccup in training could cause deadly openings. A city without dreamhunters was a city susceptible to its own nightmares, a city where the smallest child could summon a nightmare-whale the size of a skyscraper, and no one would be able to stop it from destroying everything in its path.

So the dreamhunter students went out on their missions with their partners, their weapons drawn and ready, their termination requests pulled up on their cuff screens. Emery curled herself into a tighter ball, hoping to squash the frustration rising in her chest.

She should have been going with them. She should have been normal, like them. Been on track, like them. Been safe, at least for now.

She shifted, dislodging a bit of snow from the slanted roof, as her phone buzzed in her pocket. She ignored it. Her gloves were too bulky to pull it out, her fingers too cold to use it, and besides, she didn't feel like talking to anyone.

Every time she convinced herself she might be safe or normal, she saw Edgar on the floor of that gazebo with her gun, after he'd pulled the trigger and wiped his own half-formed doppelgänger out of existence. Then she saw her own doppelgänger—Morrigan, wicked black hair floating around her head, the avatar of Emery's subconscious, come to take over her body—screaming at her, screaming at Edgar, screaming for the brother she'd just lost.